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Commission accomplished

| 11 December 2008 When you have a set of new hardware and a clear mission ahead of you, the first step to complete the mission is to commission the hardware. After reconfiguring their storage ring and light source CESR, Cornell University and the international ILC team working on damping ring studies switched on the machine in early October and performed the first electron cloud studies in the low emittance configuration in November. “It was an intense week and we have some very interesting new data,” says Mark Palmer, CesrTA project manager. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , ,

The first Project Advisory Committee review

| 6 November 2008 As we move forward in the Technical Design Phase, a new review process is being developed with two principle elements: a primarily internal review process for ongoing in-depth technical reviews and an external review process for accountability and high-level reviewing. Our external reviewers who report to the International Linear Collider Steering Committee (ILCSC), the Project Advisory Committee (PAC) chaired by Jean-Eudes Augustin, held their first meeting in Paris in early October and have now released their first report. Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: ,

Damping starts this week

| 10 July 2008 There may not have been a ribbon-cutting ceremony or speeches by heads of state. But the official kick-off of Cornell University's CESR storage ring as ILC damping ring test facility pleased the nearly 40 participants at this week's "Joint CesrTA Kickoff Meeting and ILC Damping Rings R&D Workshop (ILCDR08)" enormously. “CesrTA will give us a detailed picture of the how electron cloud builds up under a range of conditions, of how an ultra-low emittance positron beam interacts with the electron cloud, and of how beam instabilities driven by the electron cloud develop,” says Andy Wolski, damping ring group leader based at the Cockcroft Institute in the UK. “In this respect CesrTA plays a critical role in validating the decision to reduce costs by eliminating the second positron damping ring.” Category: Around the World | Tagged: , , ,

Hail Cesr

| 29 May 2008 Sometimes even pretty straightforward and remarkably logical ideas take several moves before they become a reality. Take the planned damping rings for the ILC, for example. In the ILC, compact bunches of electrons and positrons are made to collide at very high energy. In order to ensure a high rate of particle collisions, the bunches are cooled in damping rings prior to acceleration. In a cold bunch, the particles are all very close together and travelling in very nearly the same direction with very nearly the same velocity. (In a hot bunch, as in a hot pot of water, the particles are more dispersed and are all moving in different directions.) Category: Feature | Tagged: , , , ,

The value of science

| 24 April 2008 What is your science worth? A question I have recently heard raised during many over-coffee discussions. The question is of course rhetorical: none of us can really answer it. But the fact that it is being asked at all is part of a reaction to the GDE management's policy to make the cost of the project a central focus of the Technical Design Phase. Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: ,

The next step towards the ILC – building a truly global team

| 27 March 2008 It has been roughly a year since the completion of the Reference Design Report (RDR) and the creation of a project-oriented design effort. It is reasonable, therefore, to look broadly over our accomplishments and the direction in which we are heading. Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: , , ,

Collective wisdom

| 17 January 2008 ...I said that we hoped to come up with a revised plan for the next phase of our ILC R&D programme, and I report today on our conclusions and consensus as to how we propose to redefine our plans and goals in response to the new budget constraints. Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: , ,